AI Image
Binance hacked for record $6.3B, withdrawals suspended after “complex attack”
Yahoo Finance • • business
Key Points:
- Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, suffered a historic $6.3 billion hack, with about half of the stolen assets frozen; customer withdrawals have been temporarily suspended while the exchange promises to cover all losses using company funds.
- The hack involved a complex, multi-person attack likely originating from a compromised engineer's laptop and targeted Binance's wallet-signing infrastructure, enabling unauthorized transactions across multiple blockchains.
- Approximately $3 billion in assets, mostly stablecoins, have been frozen on-chain with assistance from issuers like Tether and Circle; however, attackers still control over $3 billion in crypto that cannot be directly frozen.
- Blockchain analysis firms have attributed the hack to North Korean hackers linked to the group TraderTraitor, responsible for previous major crypto thefts, marking this as potentially the largest crypto hack to date.
- The incident has negatively impacted crypto markets and related stocks, with Bitcoin, Ether, Binance's native token BNB, and shares of crypto firms like Coinbase and Circle experiencing significant declines following the breach.
